The facts, persons, and incidents with which we have to deal in treating of this special matter of religious contention within the English Church, give us simply the opening in series and course of what under various modifications is known as the history of Dissent. The strife then engendered has continued essentially the same down to our own times, turning upon the same points of controversy and upon contested principles, rights, and methods. The present relations of the parties to this entailed dissension may throw some light back upon the working of the elements in it when it was first opened. The result which has been reached, after the processes engaged in it for nearly four centuries, shows itself to us in a still existing National Church establishment in England, with authority and vested rights, privileges, and prerogatives, yet nevertheless repudiated by nearly, if not quite, half of the subjects of the realm. The reason or the right, the grounds or the justification, of the original workings of Dissent have certainly been suspended long enough for discussion and judgment upon their merits to help us to reach a fair decision upon them. The indifference, even the strong distaste, which writers and readers alike feel to a rehearsal in our days of the embittered and aggravated strife,—often concerned too, with what seem to us petty, trivial, and perverse elements of scruple, temper, and passion,—in the early Puritan controversy in the Church of England, may be sensibly relieved by the spirit of fairness and consideration in which the subject is treated in the most recent dealing with it by able and judicious writers. There are even now in the utterances of pulpit and platform, and in the voluminous pages of pamphlet, essay, and so-called history, survivals and renewals of all the sharpness and acrimoniousness of the original passions of the controversy. And where this spirit has license, the lengthening lapse of time will more or less falsify the truth of the relation of either side of the strife. One whose sympathies are with either party may rightly claim that it be fairly presented, its limitations, excesses, and even its perversities being excused or palliated, where reasons can be shown. Nor is one who for any fair purpose undertakes a statement or exposition of the views and course of either of those parties to be regarded as also its champion and vindicator. But no rehearsal of the controversy will have much value or interest for readers of our day which does assume such championship of one party. As the Puritans, Nonconformists, or Dissenters, from the beginning up to this day, were substantially defeated, disabled, and made the losers of the object for which they contended, they may fairly claim the allowance of making the best possible statement of their cause.